The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
For a wireless communication system to achieve its maximum throughput and link quality, the impact of outside radio frequency (RF) interference on the communication link must be minimized. Interference occurs when devices other than those used in the communication system emit energy in the same RF spectrum that the communication system uses.
Link performance of a wireless communication system can also be degraded by interference from devices that use the same protocol as the communication system but do not communicate with the communication system. When multiple devices operate in the same communications channel they must share the bandwidth of the communications channel and therefore only obtain a fraction of the throughput they could achieve if they were operating alone in the communications channel.
Interference is common when a wireless communication system operates in an unlicensed band where several other wireless devices are allowed to communicate in the same spectrum. For example, an 802.11b/g communication system operates in the 2.4-2.5 GHz Industrial, Scientific, and Medical (ISM) radio band. Other consumer devices such as microwave ovens, cordless phones, and Bluetooth devices are also permitted to operate in this band. If one of these devices emits a signal using the same frequency spectrum and at the same time as the 802.11 communication system, then the throughput and link quality achieved by the communication system can be significantly reduced.
Real-time spectral displays are often an effective tool for analyzing and diagnosing interference and other performance issues that may be present in a wireless communication system. In many cases, it is useful to view these spectral displays from times in the past to support post-event forensics to determine the cause of interference. However, continuous storage of streaming spectrum data, particularly from a large network of sensors, is inefficient on network and storage resources. It also presents a large amount of recordings which, in turn, can result in inefficiencies in analysis of the history of the RF environment.